TDK’s fault tolerant motion sensing product family for industrial applications

TDK Corporation new high performance and fault tolerant InvenSense inertial measurement unit (IMU) family targeted at industrial applications. The new products, IIM-46234 and IIM-46230, include multiple 6-axis sensors, each of which can measure three dimensions of linear acceleration and three dimensions of rotational rate.

With its ability to take precise measurements in harsh environments characterized by the presence of vibration and wide temperature variations, the IIM-4623X product family is applicable to a variety of navigation and stabilization applications including precision agriculture, construction machinery, aerial vehicles and industrial robots. An example application would be a construction vehicle that can combine IIM-4623X measurements with data from a global navigation system, such as GPS, to determine precise position, attitude and motion in real time. Such real-time information is crucial for increased automation, efficiency and safety of mobile industrial machinery. The new family also integrates TDK’s unique SensorFT™ feature for fault tolerance.

“The SensorFT™ feature in IIM-46234 and IIM-46230 combines multi-IMU hardware design with our proprietary fault detection and recovery software to deliver built-in redundancy and early warning capabilities,” said Uday Mudoi, Director of Industrial Marketing at InvenSense, a TDK Group Company. “A system that includes IIM-4623X sensors could provide customers with advanced warnings, enabling preventative maintenance to avoid operational disruption.”

IIM-46234 and IIM-46230 products deliver:

• Precise measurements enabled by highly accurate and ultra-low noise sensors
• Factory calibration ensuring that the measurements are reliable over a wide temperature range
• A microsecond accurate timestamp with all the sensor measurements enabling accurate time transfer with rest of the system

TDK customers can combine the high performance industrial IMU family with the InvenSense Coursa Drive software to deliver a market-ready inertial navigation system (INS) with minimal development cost and resources. In real time, Coursa Drive provides high-rate, 100 Hz delta positions and orientation to the AV system, complementing the lower-rate position references from GNSS and perception systems. For improved system fault-tolerance, Coursa Drive can provide decimeter position precision for short periods when the GNSS or perception systems are uncertain or unavailable.